TB Fit Project

DLSHSI has been named one of six Philippine research institutions among recipients and implementors of science researches funded through Newton Agham Program or the UK-Philippines Joint Heath Research Grant for Infectious Diseases.

The title of the project that has been assigned to DLSHSI is “Impact Assessment of Diagnostic Tools for Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR-TB) and Drug Sensitive Tuberculosis (DS-TB) in the Philippines.” Dr. Charles Y. Yu, DLSHSI’s vice chancellor for Lasallian Mission and Linkages and a WHO TB expert, will lead the project as principal investigator, aided by DLSHSI’s noted TB and infectious diseases experts Dr. Victoria Dalay, Dr. Victor Mendoza, and Dr. Jovilla Abong as co-investigators. The DLSHSI team will also be joined by Ms. Celine Garfin, the National TB Program manager from the Department of Health as co-investigator.

The project, which will run for a year, aims to build capacity in using the modeling technique for policy development in TB diagnostics. Meanwhile, Dr. Raul Destura, a member of DLSHSI’s College of Medicine batch ’96 and currently the director of the UP-Manila National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, also received a major grant from the same fund to pursue his proposal on “Triple D Targets: The UK-Philippines Dengue Diagnostic and Drug Targets Research Consortium.” Dr. Destura is the primary investigator of the team that developed the LAMP Kit, a dengue diagnostic test that detects dengue as early as on the second day of fever.